AMAZING STORY

Lauretta Pierce: From Victim to Victor

By Shannon Woodland
The 700 Club

CBN.com -“I’m 23 and I have kids. There is a man and he’s breaking bones every chance he gets. When I met him, he was a charmer and I was damaged.” The man was Lauretta Pierce’s boyfriend, father of her youngest child and her abuser for many years. She fell for his smooth talk.

Lauretta put up with the abuse because she had no reason to believe things should be different. She was molested when she was 13. At 14 she suffered a stroke resulting from the abuse. Lauretta came to the conclusion that God didn’t care. “There’s no way at all, at all that I believe God loves me.”

So she fell for men who abused her – the father of her fourth and youngest child did the most damage; sometimes using their son’s baseball bat.

“(I have) a grown son now who doesn’t want to watch baseball or hear the sound of a bat because he hears ‘I’m going to take your bat. I’m going to break your mother’s legs. Put her in a car. Pour gasoline on her. Set her on fire, so you can hear her scream.’”

One night her boyfriend tried to kill her. “A human being, holding my head, taking their hands, like an animal, and literally ripping my face apart. And I thought, ‘God, not where were You, how did You feel watching me? I was helpless.’”

Lauretta was treated at an area hospital. Her boyfriend was arrested and sentenced to prison. Later he died of cancer. She was free from the terror, but the scars on her face reinforced Lauretta’s belief that God didn’t care. “God was not in the equation. He wasn’t there any other time, why now?”

Lauretta worked several jobs to support her kids. Then she met another man. He seemed different. “Here comes this guy. He’s attractive and another charmer, and we wound up marrying after a couple of years, and I really thought that it was good.”

But her husband had multiple affairs. So she divorced him. Lauretta and the kids moved into a low rent apartment. One day at lunch, a friend suggested they have a cocktail. “Something about the way I felt that day made me want another drink the next day.”

Lauretta couldn’t function without alcohol. “Two years later, first thing in the morning I have a drink. By lunch time I needed a drink. I needed a drink when I got off work, and I needed to drink to get to sleep.”

While driving to a friend’s house to party, a Christian song on a secular radio station got her attention. “And I heard the words, ‘Someone may be wondering why we sing this song. Sometimes we may be crying when nothing’s even wrong.’ And when he sang, ‘I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free. His eye is on the sparrow...’ I pulled my car on the side of the road and I said, ‘I am not happy.’ I was functioning and in so much pain. And I remember saying, ‘Hey God, if You want me…’ not love me, it’s amazing, I wasn’t even thinking about love. I just thought, ‘want’, ‘if You want me, I’m here. I’m here.’”

Lauretta turned the car around and drove home. “Walking in the door I thought, ‘This is what it’s like to give your life to the Lord.’ I didn’t say, ‘I give my life. I surrender my life. I know You died for my sins.’ I just said, ‘If You want me, I’m here.’ And I thought I’ve got to get this alcohol out of here. And I got trash bags. I had that much. And, I began to bag it up and throw it away. And I looked at my kids one of them asked me something, and I said, ‘I’m saved.’”

Lauretta became a Christian and spent hours reading the Bible and praying. “I just hungered for God. It was like crazy hunger; morning, noon and night hunger.”

But there was still a tough road ahead. She was raising four children by herself. Lauretta says she started to see that, despite the hard times, God was always there. “All that He allowed me to go through, God says, ‘Put your name there that I love you.’ And I said, ‘God loves Lauretta,’ and I said it again, ‘God loves Lauretta,’ and for the third time I remember when I said, ‘God loves Lauretta,’ I had hope. I didn’t know what the hope was, but it was like a release.”

Lauretta says she found her peace with God and for the first time in years she was able to smile. As time passed, Lauretta watched her kids grow up. She worked at a steady job until God gave her the idea for a business called covenant cookies. What started as Bible verses and inspirational sayings baked in a fortune cookie has become a booming internet business.

“My joy at the end of the day – It’s so funny. - is saying, ‘I bet you’re happy today.’ And I can reflect back on the day that I was almost murdered, and I knew God’s heart was heavy. He can look at me now and just celebrate with me, triumphantly, that we did it. We did it together. It’s always been me and God against this world!”